The Sixth Day of Christmas: Ending with Beginnings

We're going to a wedding tonight, and I really can't think of a better to end this year. I ended both of my semesters with weddings. It felt so fitting to end with a beginning because no end points merely to the past, an end also looks towards the future.


It's been a good year, hard in so many ways, beautiful in more. Tonight will be a celebration of God's faithfulness: to our friends getting married, and also to His bride, the church.

Merry sixth day of Christmas, friends! Here's some T.S. Eliot to end the year and look forward to the next.

(excerpts from East Coker)

In my beginning is my end. Now the light falls
Across the open field, leaving he deep lane
Shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon.
[...]
On a summer midnight, you can hear the music
Of the weak pipe and the little drum
And see them dancing around the bonfire
The association of man and woman
In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie --
A dignified and commodiois sacrament,
Two and two, necessarye conjunction,
Holding eche other by the hand or the arm
Whiche betonketh concorde. Round and round the fire
Leaping through the flames, or joined in circles,
Rustically solemn or in rustic laughter
Lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes,
Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth
Mirth of those long since under the eart
Nursing the corn. Keeping time,
Keeping the rhythm in their dancing
As in their living in the living seasons
The time of the seasons and the constellations
The time of milking and the time of harvest
The time of the coupling of man and woman
And that of beasts. Feat rising and falling.
Eating and drinking. Dung and death.

Dawn points and another day
Prepares for heat and silence. Out at sea the dawn wind
Wrinkles and slides. I am here
Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning.




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